Double karma, p.10
Double Karma, page 10
The SLORC’s promotion of the Tatmadaw had no other purpose than the swelling of its ranks. Between 1988 and 2000, the number of military personnel in Burma would more than double, from 180,000 to 400,000. All this while the regime was squandering the country’s intellectual capital, crushing the dreams of its youth and destroying their potential by keeping universities closed. The push to army up was well under way in that first year while I was there, and my bosses made sure I wasted no opportunity to promote it by visiting recruitment centres with my camera. But taking photos of new draftees was a real chore: most of these boys, fresh out of high school, were miserable about their situation. It showed on their faces, and I felt their pain as I took these photos. By journalistic standards they were good images that told a real story, for they captured the hopelessness of Burma’s press-ganged youth under the junta. Much later, I would use these photos in a context far removed from this moment. But the editor of The Working People’s Daily, my superior, was outraged when I showed him the prints.
“How can we possibly use these?” he spat at me. “Those boys have to be smiling. Go back and do another shoot.”
I explained I could not force them to smile.
The editor sighed, shaking his head before disappearing into the next room for a few minutes. He returned with a box filled with sweets, cinema tickets, and a small wad of cash, telling me to dish it out to every new soldier willing to be photographed. So yes, the generals got their recruitment photos.
* * *
Soon after I began working for the SLORC, I learned that the Burma Communist Party had collapsed after decades of defeat and a recent outbreak of acrimonious infighting that had led to a mutiny. The SLORC’s top generals celebrated this news as a great victory. Their glee was understandable, since the greatest military force arising from the BCP’s ashes, the United Wa State Army, would end up replacing an ideological threat with an empire-building opportunity: a ceasefire agreement with the SLORC that would allow the UWSA, with the Tatmadaw’s assistance, to expand its narcotic drug trafficking operations to neighbouring Thailand and Laos. A win-win for the Tatmadaw and the ethnic army, both of whom reaped the rewards of a booming trade in opium and, sometime later, methamphetamines.
The UWSA was one of five armies that reached ceasefire agreements with the SLORC after the collapse of the BCP. It was my job to attend the signing ceremonies for each of these ceasefires and to take photos of SLORC/Tatmadaw bigwigs posing with rebel army chiefs. After one of these ceremonies, the festivities continued with a dinner. Everyone got so drunk that I was told to put away the camera. It’s hard to remember much of what happened next because I, too, was drunk. I do recall the rebel chief tearfully confessing, as we sidled up to the bar for another round of cheap whisky: “We’ve sold our souls to the devil with this fucking deal. My people will never forgive me.”
By early 1990, reports from the border areas were confirming, with devastating clarity, the futility of challenging the Burmese army on the battlefield. In mid-February, a Tatmadaw force of more than a thousand soldiers overran the small town of Three Pagodas Pass near the Thai border. Dozens of rebels were killed, including ABSDF fighters who’d been sent in as reinforcements. The Tatmadaw added insult to injury by seizing large amounts of timber and logging equipment, arms, and battlefield communications gear from the rebels. In late March, the Tatmadaw destroyed a joint force of Mon and student rebels that had launched a major attack on the town of Ye, in southern Mon State. The disastrous ambush resulted in the loss of forty rebels, several of them killed under bombardment by the Burmese Air Force.
On hearing these reports, my Ministry colleagues celebrated with loud triumphalist cheering and idiotic drinking games. They were delighted. But I was reminded of Maw Pokay. How stunning it had been, how dumbfounding, to come face to face with the full force of the Tatmadaw juggernaut, with its giant battalions launching wave after wave of deadly assault! I was deeply depressed by the news of these crushing defeats for the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, among whose ranks I had belonged only months earlier. Such overwhelming battle losses only reinforced my initial doubts about the wisdom of trying to defeat this regime through armed combat. When civil war breaks out in a country ruled by military dictatorship, the generals are in it for the long haul; completely invested in their self-preservation, clutching to power at all costs, they’re in it to win it. The Tatmadaw, having built up the largest arsenal of weaponry and manpower that side of China, spared no expense in crushing its enemies. Domestic insurgency, without the full support of large foreign corporations, governments, or both, was a suicide wish.
The longer I stayed in Burma, the more compromised I felt. Each day after work, my driver would take me back to Inya Lake where I’d sit in the living room with a confiscated novel — Ian Fleming, who knew? — while the butler, unsolicited, served me one gin and tonic after another. Bored and impatient as 1989 gave way to 1990, I couldn’t wait for the elections. During the final weeks before the vote, I noticed the same little red flag flying from cars, shops, and restaurant windows everywhere in downtown Rangoon: the “fighting peacock” of the NLD’s party insignia, the traditional symbol of Burmese nationalism. The flag looked a bit like Communist Vietnam’s, but the star was white rather than yellow and flushed left rather than centred, as if chased to the margins by the yellow peacock scampering from the lower right corner. The pride of the people, keeping the army in its place?
After the elections were held on May 27, it took another two weeks for the results to be announced. But the news was as good as it gets: a massive majority — more than 7.9 million people or 60 per cent — had cast their votes for the National League for Democracy. Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, who heard the results over radio from the privacy of house arrest, won a larger percentage of the parliamentary seats, taking 392 of the 447 contested. I was so thrilled that I began forming my plan for escape.
I would do nothing rash, I decided, but wait until the new NLD administration was sworn in. Then I would hire a lawyer to conduct negotiations with the government. As Aung Win, I had gained access to classified material; the new regime would first want to clear me as a security risk before letting me go. Burma’s new leader — Suu Kyi, though the SLORC had forbidden her from running for office — would be all too aware of the junta’s intimidating methods and thus rule that my recruitment due to mistaken identity made my sixteen months of fraud a forgivable offence. I would then be granted full amnesty and pardoned, likely on condition of deportation. Suu Kyi would arrange for Foreign Affairs to contact the US Embassy and send me a new passport. Shortly after that, the new Information Minister would call a press conference to reveal my identity and confirm the death of Aung Win. Then I’d be free.
My next priority would be a brief reunion with Thandar, certain to be freed along with every other political prisoner. Our first meeting since the night after the coup would be painful, our engagement called off by mutual consent once I confessed what I’d been up to all this time. I would also attribute my misguided marriage proposal to the fanciful whims of a tourist caught up in the euphoric springtime of a nascent democracy movement — leaving out the part about sexual contact with an underage Rohingya male more than a year after Thandar’s jailing. Then I would fly home. How long would this take? Hard to say, but I figured no more than a month.
Before the election, SLORC dictator Saw Maung had promised to hand over power to the winning party. With the NLD clearly the winner, I estimated that it might take a couple of weeks for Suu Kyi to assemble her transition team and swear in her cabinet, then perhaps another week for me to hire the lawyer and prepare my documents. In a perfect world, I’d be home in LA by mid-July. Alas, it was not a perfect world. After the election results were announced, the NLD took Saw Maung at his word and put off its public call for Parliament to convene. The people were too ecstatic and the public mood too euphoric to bother pressing the issue of governing right away. But as each day gave way to the next, I began to see a lot fewer of those NLD flags. No transition appeared on the horizon. As the days turned into weeks, I began to wonder, like everyone else, What’s the big delay? There had been no reports of ballot box tampering, and the SLORC had not contested the numbers. But still, nothing happened.
Another month passed with no more news about the election. Then, on July 27 — exactly two months after the vote — I arrived at the office to find Soe Moe stretching back in his chair, a bottle of whisky on his desk and a smirk on his face. He handed me the press release he had just written. The candidates elected on May 27, it said, were not actually MPs-elect and the election was not about forming a new government; it was about launching a process to rewrite the constitution so that one day there could be a democratic transition. A small number of NLD MPs would be invited to join the SLORC’s hand-picked group of Army officers to draw up the new constitution.
I didn’t get it, I told Soe Moe. Did this mean there would be no transition?
He coolly replied that I was right, eyeing me carefully. Business as usual.
So, there it was: the generals had been playing for time until they could squash the people’s hopes forever. Having promised an election, they were deluded enough to think their party could actually win it. When they lost, they were shocked, so they changed their minds — stubbornly refusing to honour their promise. I felt like an idiot. Having spent the past sixteen months observing these men, how could I have thought for a moment that the SLORC would simply hand over power like the keys to a factory for the next crew’s shift? Instead of allowing elected NLD members of parliament to take office as the new government — or follow through on that invite to help them draw up a new constitution — the SLORC began arresting them. The party was outlawed and public display of NLD images prohibited; party offices were closed throughout the country and Suu Kyi’s house arrest was extended. Hundreds of NLD activists went into hiding or fled to Thailand to form a government-in-exile.
With the SLORC refusing to give up power, the dream of democracy was over. The bad old days were here to stay. That was my cue to get the hell out of Burma. Escape through the Thai border was my only option but running away this time would be trickier than two years earlier; I was no longer the anonymous Mandalay farmer with freedom of movement but someone whose presence in Rangoon too many people knew about. I was a minor SLORC official whose whereabouts were monitored. Then there was Thandar to think about. I had promised myself I wouldn’t leave the country until I had done everything possible to spring her loose from Insein. Now, sixteen months after returning from the jungle, I had done nothing on her behalf. What was worse, I had discovered Thandar’s name on a list of political prisoners given twenty-five-year sentences — a term indicating that the regime saw my fiancée as one of the country’s most dangerous political activists. I couldn’t show anyone how much this news upset me. A jail sentence of this length, devastating enough for Thandar, would be a terrible blow to her family. Her added notoriety would only make things worse for her parents.
After learning of Thandar’s jail term, I wished there was some way I could comfort her or offer encouragement about the future. Even though I no longer had any intention of marrying her, I also wanted to see her. But it was hopeless, and I knew I couldn’t. Only immediate family were allowed contact with political prisoners; a minor SLORC official trying to visit an inmate at Insein without permission could be locked up for insubordination. Visiting her parents wouldn’t work either; apart from the risk of exposure if I encountered their neighbours, they might well have already suffered terrible consequences for Thandar’s criminal conviction and were no longer reachable. Since the coup, about three thousand Rangoon residents had been forcibly evicted from their homes and relocated in satellite shanty towns on the northern and eastern outskirts of the city, some eight hundred of their homes demolished. Were Mr. and Mrs. Aye among this unfortunate group? Surely, they would have contacted me by now, as Aung Win was well-known and his resemblance too much of a coincidence for them not to have noticed. But when I checked city records for their house in Mayangone Township, it was still there.
I had run out of excuses not to try reaching Thandar directly. So, on July 28, I wrote her a letter in my best Burmese, taking care not to include anything incriminating. I started by acknowledging what a shock it would be for her to hear from me at all, since she had probably received word of my death more than a year ago. It was too long and complicated a story to explain how and why I was reported as missing and presumed dead, but I wanted her to know that I was still in Burma and yes, very much alive. I could not imagine how dreadful it must have been for her to be stuck in that place, the horrors she and her fellow inmates must have been suffering. I assured her that I missed her, that I hoped she would forgive me for not having communicated sooner and that my letter would reach her somehow. I closed off by reassuring her that she had the inner strength to persevere through her long sentence, that I dreamt of the day we would be together once again, and that I would hold her in my heart until that moment. Signing off as her fiancé, I stuffed the letter into an envelope and sealed it.
For some time afterward, I felt like I should have crumpled up the letter and started over, removing certain notes of affection bound to be misleading. For months now our engagement had felt stale-dated, as if the statute of limitations on my fiancé status had expired the moment I shared that second kiss with Sayed Hosin. I shouldn’t have used words like “dearest” and “darling” or spoken of missing her, though of course I did. Now I missed her as I would a favourite sister. In the wake of that brief and furtive moment in a rusty old fishing boat on the Rangoon River, I found myself revisiting every moment I’d spent with the woman I had planned to marry. Two years later, it was hard to fathom my hasty proposal, given the platonic nature of our relations. At some point in my liberated future, I would explain the move as a desperate avoidance of my true nature, a bid to satisfy my father’s wishes for grandchildren. While in no way diminishing my love for Thandar as a comrade and soulmate, the encounter with Sayed Hosin had driven a wedge between us, suggesting incompatibility. That, and the fact I was still in Burma because I was working for the junta, would have broken her heart had I told her.
After choosing a hiding place near the family home, I stashed the letter. Then I looked up the number of a friend of Thandar’s brothers who hadn’t met me. Reaching him from a post office phone, I identified myself only as a schoolmate of Thandar and asked for a favour, telling him where I’d left the letter. The next day, I returned to the hiding place; the letter was gone. I trusted that my courier would pass it along to Aye Maung or Hla Min who, in turn, would find a way to smuggle it past the guards at Insein so it reached their sister. Having no idea where I was, nor how to reach me, she could not respond. But at least she would know I was thinking about her.
The next day, I woke up at five o’clock. After packing some clothes and a few belongings, I took one last look out the bedroom window at my favourite view of Inya Lake. I was about to walk out the door when I noticed the Thiha Thura Medal still hanging on the wall. I pulled it off by the ribbon and looked at it closely, running my thumb over the edges of its golden star in the centre. I was tempted to take it with me — what a conversation piece it would have made! — but changed my mind. If I were apprehended before reaching the border with a military medal for gallantry in my possession, that would be the end of my escape plan. Instead, I quietly placed it on the bedside table and tiptoed downstairs. The domestic staff hadn’t begun work yet, so I slipped out of the mansion unnoticed and made my way downtown.
It took me a while to find a parked car with its key in the ignition. Once I did, I stole the car and drove it a few blocks before turning into an alley where I found five or six other parked cars. I stopped to switch plates with one of them, then drove it out of the city and didn’t look back until I was clear of Pegu, north of Rangoon. When I arrived in Karen State and reached Myaing Ka Lay — a small village on the banks of the Thanlwin River, not far from Hpa-an — I parked in an alley, abandoned the car, and began wandering around town looking for someone I could trust. Stopping at a beer bar, I chatted up a chicken farmer who said he was going to Mae Sot. I offered him a hundred thousand kyats for a lift, and he agreed.
When I lifted the tarpaulin covering the back of his truck before hopping in, I was overcome by the stench of chicken manure. Lying in the cargo bed between two sets of cages were two other men, a woman, and a couple of young boys. I climbed in and joined them, pulling the tarp back into place. The farmer turned on the ignition, setting the truck on its way. Soon I heard the humming and felt the vibration of its tires going over a bridge. The truck slowed down as it approached the checkpoint. As it came to a halt, I heard a soldier approach. I held my breath as the farmer stepped out of his truck to join him for a cigarette, the two men making small talk as they stepped around the back.
“Pretty routine work these days?” the farmer was asking.
“Mostly,” the soldier replied. “Except for the alert from Yangon about some staffer from the Ministry of Information who failed to report for work. Wait a minute …” The soldier went off to his booth, returning a few moments later. “Have you seen anyone who looks like this?” he asked. I gulped. The soldier was showing the farmer my official SLORC photo. I watched the others lying with me in the truck bed, the adults regarding me warily. The woman and one of the men covered the two little boys’ mouths to keep them quiet.
